Creating quilts that do a bit more than lie on a bed and look good is a must for nationally known machine-quilter Laura Lee Fritz. “I want people to pick up my quilts 100 years from now and learn about our culture,” she says. “I don’t quilt to make something pretty, I quilt to tell a story. I believe quilts should express the humanity of the human heart.”

One of her favorite quilts, Signs of Summer, is designed to be a visual time capsule showing future generations how the people of today spend their summers. Some of the many images stitched into the quilt are people playing baseball, surfing, riding the rodeo, scuba diving, sailing, kayaking, and climbing, with whales, sharks, sea planes, kites, flowers, birds, and the Golden Gate Bridge thrown in for good measure.

Signs of Summer by Laura Lee Fritz

The Storyteller’s Own Story

Born and raised in Berkeley, California, Laura is a self-taught machine-quilting enthusiast who knew from an early age that she wanted to be an artist. Going to art shows as a young child, she learned that artists could in fact make a living, and later realized that fabric would be her medium. She began machine quilting in 1989. At the time, she was one of only two people in California who owned a long-arm quilting machine. She taught herself how to make the continuous line designs that brought her fame as a quilter and formed the basis of her four books with C&T Publishing. Her most recent releases are: Creative Classics: 250 Playful Continuous-Line Quilting Designs, and Mindful Meandering: 132 Original Continuous-Line Quilting Designs.

Today, Laura splits her time between Northern California, where she keeps a full teaching schedule at Napa Valley College, and rural Bitterroot Valley, Montana, where she raises bluetick hounds, Navajo-Icelandic sheep, and just recently picked up a few cashmere goats because they were cute. “If you saw them, you would have brought them home too,” she explains. Laura practices spinning and weaving as a form of cross-training to keep her thinking from getting too narrow. “I like to reach out beyond quilting and work in different media,” she says.

Taking Machine Quilting Online

Laura’s newest adventure in quilting is hosting an online club for machine quilters with C&T Publishing. The club, called It’s Quilted! Laura Lee Fritz’s Continuous Line Club, offers monthly in-depth machine quilting lessons for both long-arm and short-arm machines, plus new quilting designs, a blog, Q&A forum, and a quilt gallery.

What’s next? Definitely more quilting. Laura says quilting is like eating and breathing to her. “Quilting is a high, a total adrenaline rush that I can’t live without,” she says. “It’s in my blood. I will always play with fabric and love the art.”